


Waking Up

by mindthetarget



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-04-08 11:16:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4302708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindthetarget/pseuds/mindthetarget
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint is having a really hard time being awake for some reason, something is wrong, and what is that knocking in his head? </p>
<p>“The niggling thought of something he should do, something important, some reason not to close his eyes, floats from the back of his head down to behind his eyelids, but it dissipates like ink in water and melds into the weight of his brain, forgotten...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waking Up

Clint shuffles through the hotel room. Locking the door is a reflex. He is three feet from the door and has already lost one shoe, his sock is half off and flopping from his toes like a sweat-stained cotton fish. The other shoe is being stubborn; it wants him to use his  _hands_  to take it off, and hell if he’s going to bend over right now and deal with shoe laces. He opts to leave it as is, and let the sock be a fish if it wants too.

His shirt is easier to deal with, at first. It comes off halfway, but he can’t seem to get it loose from his neck and right arm, so it bunches there. Pants, those are simpler. Unbutton, unzip, step on the hem with the stubborn irremovable needy damn shoe, and keep walking. Eventually they wriggle down enough to be kicked away from him, except for the leg getting stuck in the middle of that treacherous shoe and trailing him the remainder of the way to the bed.

Face down. Pillow smells like something artificial. Screw blankets, bare to the air is fine.

The niggling thought of something he should do, something important, some reason not to close his eyes, floats from the back of his head down to behind his eyelids, but it dissipates like ink in water and melds into the weight of his brain, forgotten.

He sleeps the kind of sleep that is more like passing gently into death than into rest.

 

* * *

 

He wakes with a dry mouth and itchy eyes and a sore ankle because he has twisted it funny in order to sleep face-down with his shoe still on and the jeans wrapped around it. His neck has a crick in it from the awkward noose of his half-shed shirt, the muscles in his shoulder already tense from compensating. For two minutes, it is acceptable to remain unmoving on the hotel bed and stare sightlessly at the crease of the room six feet away where carpet meets baseboard on the wall.

As his brain wakes in increments, his eyes focus to their full and exceptional acuity. He can see the loops of the carpet, then the threads making up the loops, and then the fibers making up the threads. There are ultra thin but coarsely textured black fibers mixed in with the otherwise cream carpet, creating a slightly peppered sand color. He sees a small sugar ant maneuver through the jungle of the carpet loops and disappear beneath the wall’s baseboard. It is the only ant; the hotel isn’t infested.

His cell phone is buzzing softly. With a sort of rewinding sense of time, Clint realizes his phone has been buzzing intermittently for a while now. He had switched it to vibrate and lessened the strength of the buzz to almost unnoticeable the morning before, that buzz was further muffled by the fabric it was swathed in amidst his tangled pants, and it is possible the device has been pleading for his attention for far longer than he can now recall. He can feel the vibrations through the bed better than actually hear them. He lifts a hand to his head and…yeah, his right hearing aid is gone. Maybe it’s with his missing shoe.

It takes an hour for Clint to traverse nine feet to the bathroom shower. This hour involves three attempts to leave the bed before a successful roll to the floor, the irritable discard of his shirt, a few minutes untangling his jeans from his shoe enough to unlace it and get it off, and a stumble in his underwear to the hotel coffee machine that will provide lifeblood for his revival. Three plastic cups of coffee later (he can taste the plastic in his coffee but it’s not worth caring about), he can stand upright enough to trust himself in the shower, belatedly thinking to take off his underwear. They are tossed into the bathroom waste-bin; he can go commando if he gets dressed again.

The shower has almost no water pressure, and Clint is actually grateful, because the thought of water pounding into his head is less than appealing this morning.

His shower takes most of the hour. He loses track of time. Maybe he dozes standing under the fall of water for a bit.

His phone continues to buzz in the jeans now cast on the floor by the bed, and he can feel it through the soles of his feet when he steps back out of the shower stall.

He drinks another two cups of plastic coffee and presses his forehead into the cool glass of the balcony’s sliding door. Time slips away again.

His head is knocking angrily on the left side, with a sort of distance, as if it is submerged in water, he realizes at some point. Or is that his head? Clint lifts his hand to that ear, covering it. The world gets silent and the knocking stops. He drops his hand again and the knocking is worse. He pulls that hearing aid out too and drops it to the floor; it’s damaged and he probably is lucky not to have been zapped by it when he was in the shower. He no longer hears the knocking, but he can feel it through his feet along with the buzzing phone and the subtle bounce of people walking around the hotel beyond his room.

Funny, standing is getting harder instead of easier. Maybe more coffee? Usually by cup four or five he’s not just awake, but ready to race a go-kart in a monster truck rally. He’s had…how many cups has he had?

Clint turns, a hand against the glass door to brace him, thinking he should go make more coffee, but he never makes it that far. His feet are still crossed, they didn’t turn with him right, and rather than try to uncross them, he sinks to the floor, back rubbing down the glass, until he is sitting with his legs in a mockery of a yoga pose he could never have pulled off intentionally. He tries to focus on the vibrations in the floor and the glass, focus his eyes on the source. The knocking was not his head, he somehow realizes, it’s too far away and knocking in his head can’t make the room vibrate.

He can’t focus though, and his head his heavy, and swallowing feels strange. He lets his eyes close without really registering that the room’s door has just splintered apart across the way.

 

* * *

 

Clint does not know Russian. He knows English and Italian and six forms of sign language. He should know Russian, after all these years, but he’s only picked up enough to communicate the important things, things like:

_Which way?_

_Are you okay?_

_I’m in trouble._

_I love you_.

But he does not  _know_  Russian. So he doesn’t understand the song being sung, under the breath, with a mix of humming. But he can feel the tone and melody of it in his skin and bones, through the palm curled around his elbow and the thumb resting in the crook of his arm, and the cool, smooth forearm parallel to his so that the skin touches without pressing. The song catches gently in the bone in the roof of his mouth, vibrations that sooth rather than aggravate the way phones and knocking do.

His little bit of remaining hearing is not enough to listen to the song with his ears, but he knows what singing feels like well enough without opening his eyes to see the lips move in the exaggerated and elongated motions of the act. He can feel the syllables of song enough to register lyrics, even if he doesn’t know Russian.

He knows it’s Russian because he knows the way Natasha’s voice feels in his bones, knows the subtle differences of her voice pattern when she uses English or Russian or any other language, and even when she’s singing there are clues to help him know. This is Natasha. Natasha is singing and to him, under her breath, in Russian.

“What are you singing?” he asks, hoping that he’s pronouncing the words correctly because he feels foggy and grainy and without his hearing, sometimes he can warp speech sounds slightly if he’s not fully okay.

She doesn’t answer, and he remembers when she puts fingers to his cheek (she leaves her other hand still cradling his elbow) that he’s deaf and can’t read lips or signing with his eyes closed. She could tap morse on his skin, but he instinctively feels that she doesn’t want to. So he opens his eyes.

Natasha is close, and he reads the answer as she speaks it. “I’m singing a song about chickens.”

“Chickens?” he asks, letting his brain take its time about registering the world beyond the immediate necessity of reading Natasha’s lips.

“It’s a folk song that was popular a few years ago. It doesn’t make much sense. But it has a nice melody. You were having a bad dream; it seemed to help.”

Clint nods to agree, and regrets it, because the world spins and lurches and he feels as if bubbles spurt in his vertebrae at the base of his skull. Natasha presses her thumb gently under his eye, hand steadying his head, and it helps the world to stabilize a little.

When he can see straight again, the world leveling off, he blinks heavily at his partner.

“Steve found you,” Natasha says, and he furrows his brow a little because he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He licks his lips and is about to ask why, but she shifts her head in a semblance of a denying shake, so he waits.

She explains slowly, calmly, patiently. The way her face moves tells him that if he could hear her beyond the usual hollowed murmur that is twenty percent hearing, her voice would be gentle and even.

“Your handler reported loss of visual and communication. When you didn’t report back within the waiting period, the search started. I know how you like to get your burner phones and Tony was able to use that to find you on CCTV and get a retroactive trace on the phone’s activation. We tracked it by calling it, since you wouldn’t answer. You’d gotten farther than anyone thought. Steve turned out to be closest; he found you.”

Clint is missing something. He doesn’t get what she means. Found him?

She knows the question in his face without him having to ask it. “You were on a mission, Clint, in the Philippines. You got it done, but it wasn’t clean, you got into trouble, and backup couldn’t get to you. They lost you when you tried to extract through Malaysia. Steve found you in Jakarta. You had a severe head injury and you were bleeding internally. We’re in Singapore now.”

Now things make sense. The fog in his head, the ineffectual coffee, the loss of time and mobility and will to be conscious…

And he can see, though Natasha is an expert at not showing it at all, that she was worried. Maybe not  _see_ , but he knows, because like he feels her voice in his bones, he feels the rest of her too. Natasha is blended into his marrow and blood, merged in his being, and he knows her as instinctively and involuntarily as breathing.

“Sorry,” he says. She smiles and does that subtle barely hinted head shake again.

“You got pretty far for a man with a potentially lethal head injury. You could have had permanent brain damage or died of blood loss. If you had died, then you would have to apologize. But you survived long enough for Captain America to bust down a door and find you a bathrobe before the paramedics came, so you’re forgiven.”

“Bathrobe?”

“You were naked.”

Clint grins. “What did he think of the hot bod?”

Natasha laughs a little, head tilting to the side. That’s the way she laughs when he has said something she finds not just amusing, but endearing. “He cussed. Tony got it on recording over comms. Cap will hear his own voice played back to him every time he says ‘language’ from here on out, I think. Tony is ecstatic.”

“So that means he thought I was hot, right?”

“Clint,” Natasha laughs.

The worry isn’t echoing from her anymore. She’s relieved. He doesn’t always sass off just for the hell of it; sometimes it’s because she needs him to.

He surveys his surroundings finally. Hospital, pretty nice one, lots of high tech equipment that looks like something from a S.H.I.E.L.D. experimental facility or Tony’s project piles. There are IVs in his arm. He can tell there’s a bandage on his head; he hates that, it reminds him of losing his hearing. There is also a large bandage over his torso and now that he is focusing, he can sense the stitches hidden under the gauze.

“Surgery?” he asks Natasha.

“To stop the bleeding. No permanent damage, but you’re off duty for three months until they’re sure your head is clear and your body isn’t going to spring a leak or rot of infection.” She rubs the thumb in the crook of his elbow slowly back and forth, and he feels as if his heart is vacationing, mellow and comfortable, in his arm, pulse following the slow brushing sweep of Natasha’s touch—it’s a very calming sensation. “I asked for time off,” she says.

“Going to take care of me?” he says, grin crooked and tone teasing, but he likes the idea.

Her gaze is fond, but she is still a little unhappy with him for getting hurt, so she acts as if he is a nuisance. “Going to make sure you don’t damage yourself further. You’re going to bankrupt S.H.I.E.L.D., or Stark, or both, with medical bills someday, Clint.”

Clint ponders a sassy quip. He is tired though, and Natasha is tired too, and he wants to put her at ease just as much as he wants to rest. He wants her to forgive him for being a nuisance, though he looks forward to time off with her supervision. So he settles for suggesting, “Or you could just kiss it better.”

Everything is worth it, because she does.

**Author's Note:**

> Also posted on [tumblr](http://mindthetarget.tumblr.com/post/123288065395/one-shot-waking-up).


End file.
